editing photos and given the run-around

In an attempt to delete all my duplicate photos all over the place on my pc
and external hard drive, I opened Picasa and went through all the folders
listed deleting the endless copies.

I wanted to create a 'backup' but was told it would need 2 dvds or 12 cds.
since i only have cds (each 700mb capacity) and not enough of them i thought
i would transfer to 'My Documents' on my pc and then go through all the
photos once again deleting a lot of the not so good photos.

For some reason only about a third of the photos have transferred to my
documents from Picas, and when i went back to the Picasa library, all the
duplicate folders have *returned* to the library list !

Which is very annoying since there are years worth and literally hundreds of
folders and i'm not happy to have to do it all again.

Could anyone give advice to a novice on what best to do here please? My
ultimate goal is to delete duplicates and then edit the number down and then
transfer to cd or dvd for safekeeping. Keeping if possible the original
number bytes of each photograph so I can do some detailed editing in the
future. Many thanks for any advice.

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:27:57 +0100, "john d hamilton"
wrote:

In an attempt to delete all my duplicate photos all over the place on my pc
and external hard drive, I opened Picasa and went through all the folders
listed deleting the endless copies.

I wanted to create a 'backup' but was told it would need 2 dvds or 12 cds.
since i only have cds (each 700mb capacity) and not enough of them i thought
i would transfer to 'My Documents' on my pc and then go through all the
photos once again deleting a lot of the not so good photos.

For some reason only about a third of the photos have transferred to my
documents from Picas, and when i went back to the Picasa library, all the
duplicate folders have *returned* to the library list !

Which is very annoying since there are years worth and literally hundreds of
folders and i'm not happy to have to do it all again.

Could anyone give advice to a novice on what best to do here please? My
ultimate goal is to delete duplicates and then edit the number down and then
transfer to cd or dvd for safekeeping. Keeping if possible the original
number bytes of each photograph so I can do some detailed editing in the
future. Many thanks for any advice.


On the backup question...Rather than backing up on CDs, I'd suggest
purchasing an external hard drive. You can buy an external hard drive
with 130GB of storage for as little as $60.00. I recently purchased
a Seagate 500GB for about $100.00. It's far easier to backup your
files on a hard drive than by burning CDs. It's an automatic process
on some, and something that can be done while doing other things on
the computer with any of them. The backups are easier to access, too,
compared to finding the right CD.

I don't use Picasa (tried it, hate it), so I don't know how to answer
any questions about Picasa. Damn program seems to take over
everything.







--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida

tony cooper wrote in
:

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:27:57 +0100, "john d hamilton"
wrote:

In an attempt to delete all my duplicate photos all over
the place on my pc and external hard drive, I opened Picasa
and went through all the folders listed deleting the
endless copies.

SNIP

You have to have the right software (Google is in the business
of destroying the Usenet, creating their own [WWG?], and keeping
complete personal records on everyone alive, so their software
offerings are problematic for those and a variety of other
reasons).

You also need to get ORGANIZED. Most software available today
(/like/ Picasa) is for people who have been too dumbed-down by
MS to be able to think and organize their stuff.

You need a good image viewer. Everyone recommends IrfanView so I
will as well. I don't use it, but it's very good and very free.

There is an app called ThumbsPlus, I use an OLD version, 3.30.
It does everything I need and is 4MB. The latest version is
about 18MB. Take your pick. It costs a little but it's very good
except for the horrid icons (which MAY have been changed in the
later versions, I don't know. I changed the icons in my version
because I could NOT look at them.)

http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=tp

Also, get a duplicate image finder, put ALL your photos into a
huge directory with subdirectories (which will be ALL your
current image directories), and run Unique Filer or some similar
program on it. I've tried about 5 dupe finders and UF is the
best. It also works on non-image files.

(You may know directories as "folders".)

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...gement/Unique-
Filer.shtml

There /are/ other ways of accomplishing this, like with a real
file manager which searches for duplicates using selectable
options. I use the one from www.ghisler.com which runs 100%
forever in demo version but is well worth the price.

(BTW, Earthlink is owned by Scientologists. FYI.)


--
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the
votes decide everything.
- Josef Stalin

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:10:58 -0700 (PDT), Xiaoding
wrote:

External harddrives are dodgy...

They are? Like most computer stuff, if they work out of the box they
generally continue to work.

I got one, but don't depend on it.
what do you do when it won't turn on, or gives you a "disk not found "
error?

The same thing you do when your CD won't read. Punt.

It happens. 12 CD's are not that bad, you can knock that out
in no time. Then make a second set.

You must have something faster than Nero and my burner. Twenty-four
CDs is an afternoon's aggravation. The worst part is that if you
modify an image by as much as cropping, the new image and the old
image are on separate CDs unless you burn the entire file over again.







--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:27:57 +0100, john d hamilton wrote:

In an attempt to delete all my duplicate photos all over the place on my
pc and external hard drive, I opened Picasa and went through all the
folders listed deleting the endless copies.

I wanted to create a 'backup' but was told it would need 2 dvds or 12
cds. since i only have cds (each 700mb capacity) and not enough of them
i thought i would transfer to 'My Documents' on my pc and then go
through all the photos once again deleting a lot of the not so good
photos.

For some reason only about a third of the photos have transferred to my
documents from Picas, and when i went back to the Picasa library, all
the duplicate folders have *returned* to the library list !

Which is very annoying since there are years worth and literally
hundreds of folders and i'm not happy to have to do it all again.

Could anyone give advice to a novice on what best to do here please? My
ultimate goal is to delete duplicates and then edit the number down and
then transfer to cd or dvd for safekeeping. Keeping if possible the
original number bytes of each photograph so I can do some detailed
editing in the future. Many thanks for any advice.

My photo collection is rather modest compared to some, but I've never
found it necessary to resort to 'photo management software' - I keep mine
in order by using a directory structure to represent months and years.
There would, of course, be several other practical ways to organize your
photos. I keep all my photos - which I usually shoot in RAW - my wife does
jpegs on her older smaller P&S. I read the photos into my desktop and my
laptop compter and then make a backup copy on an external USB hard drive
(they are quite reasonable now) and then from time to time make a backup
to DVD - DVD writers are also pretty inexpensive now. Needless to say, I
have never lost a photo.

print them onto special shiny paper(some people call them photographs) then
keep them in a big book where you can look at them without the need of a
computer.

--
A man should look for what is,
and not for what he thinks should be
Albert Einstein


"Dimond Geeza" wrote in message
...
On 14 Oct, 19:27, "john d hamilton" wrote:
In an attempt to delete all my duplicate photos all over the place on my
pc
and external hard drive, I opened Picasa and went through all the folders
listed deleting the endless copies.

I wanted to create a 'backup' but was told it would need 2 dvds or 12
cds.
since i only have cds (each 700mb capacity) and not enough of them i
thought
i would transfer to 'My Documents' on my pc and then go through all the
photos once again deleting a lot of the not so good photos.

For some reason only about a third of the photos have transferred to my
documents from Picas, and when i went back to the Picasa library, all the
duplicate folders have *returned* to the library list !

Which is very annoying since there are years worth and literally hundreds
of
folders and i'm not happy to have to do it all again.

Could anyone give advice to a novice on what best to do here please? My
ultimate goal is to delete duplicates and then edit the number down and
then
transfer to cd or dvd for safekeeping. Keeping if possible the original
number bytes of each photograph so I can do some detailed editing in the
future. Many thanks for any advice.

2 dvds or 12 cds..........or 1 blu ray

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:10:58 -0700 (PDT), Xiaoding
wrote:

External harddrives are dodgy...I got one, but don't depend on it.
what do you do when it won't turn on, or gives you a "disk not found "
error? It happens. 12 CD's are not that bad, you can knock that out
in no time. Then make a second set.

And put them in a sage deposit box? Overkill.

In years of external hard drives, I've had one of about 25 fail and it
was 7 years old.

tony cooper wrote in
:

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:10:58 -0700 (PDT), Xiaoding
wrote:

External harddrives are dodgy...

They are? Like most computer stuff, if they work out of
the box they generally continue to work.

Can we quote you on that? How long have you been using
computers, anyway?

I forgot to address the "external drive" issue. Hard drives
fail, internal, external, IDE, SCSI, SATA, RAID's, Western
Digital or Maxtor. Sooner or later, but pretty much guaranteed
to crap out.

OTOH, a good brand CD/DVD-R burned with GOOD software at a SLOW
speed will outlast you. It may not last 100 years, and no one
alive today will ever know if it does, but it will outlast most
of us.

I got one, but don't depend on it.
what do you do when it won't turn on, or gives you a "disk
not found " error?

The same thing you do when your CD won't read. Punt.

The only CD's which "don't read" are the ones some moron's
burned with some bundled crapware at 40x or 52x using Princo or
something. Sorry if you're one of those, but that's the truth.

It happens. 12 CD's are not that bad, you can knock that
out in no time. Then make a second set.

Much better off spending the same amt. of time burning at a slow
speed. What's the damn hurry, anyway? And you NEVER look at any
of that stuff again anyway, admit it.

You must have something faster than Nero and my burner.

I admire the patience (or is that stupidity?) of any Nero user.
The two weeks I spent with it count among the most annoying
computer experiences I've had. At least it burns OK discs, but
having to go through 20 stupid screens and dialogs designed by
obvious morons just to burn a disc is just insane. And who needs
25MB of crap bloatware when a 1MB program does it better and
faster?

Twenty-four CDs is an afternoon's aggravation. The worst
part is that if you modify an image by as much as cropping,
the new image and the old image are on separate CDs unless
you burn the entire file over again.

Life is hard and then you die.


--
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the
votes decide everything.
- Josef Stalin

ray wrote in
:

SNIP

My photo collection is rather modest compared to some, but
I've never found it necessary to resort to 'photo
management software' - I keep mine in order by using a
directory structure to represent months and years. There
would, of course, be several other practical ways to
organize your photos. I keep all my photos - which I
usually shoot in RAW - my wife does jpegs on her older
smaller P&S. I read the photos into my desktop and my
laptop compter and then make a backup copy on an external
USB hard drive (they are quite reasonable now) and then
from time to time make a backup to DVD - DVD writers are
also pretty inexpensive now. Needless to say, I have never
lost a photo.

How nice to see some people with intelligence still exist in
this "idiot box 2" century.
Good for you.

"Folders are to make paper airplanes out of."
- thanatoid



--
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the
votes decide everything.
- Josef Stalin

Oliver Costich wrote in
:

On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:10:58 -0700 (PDT), Xiaoding
wrote:

External harddrives are dodgy...I got one, but don't depend
on it. what do you do when it won't turn on, or gives you a
"disk not found " error? It happens. 12 CD's are not that
bad, you can knock that out in no time. Then make a second
set.

And put them in a sage deposit box? Overkill.

In years of external hard drives, I've had one of about 25
fail and it was 7 years old.

You're just lucky. In over 15 years of computing, I've had about
35% failure rate.
I may be just extremely /un/lucky, but totally depending on a HD
is just stupid.



--
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the
votes decide everything.
- Josef Stalin